I wasn't aware that Pepperman had asked permission. A nice, courteous thing to do, IMO.

But my point is that it didn't matter. To me, at least, it was very obvious that he was here to be a member in good standing, that selling his griddle was almost secondary.

And I really couldn't understand my correspondent's inability to see the difference between him and those Johnny-one-shots and their BS messages about "I just found this great site...." or "I'm trying to figure the difference between A & B over at Site X."

I am always suspicious when somebody joins a site, posts one message which sends us somewhere else, and then disappears.

Ironically, the site might be something of interest; a place that I'd like to explore if a real members talked about it. I just don't like the sneakiness of those people. And their attitude that the rest of us are so stupid we can't figure them out.

Like I've said - the ones that do theor "post and run" never last long and they get found out fast.

Defining a spammer is a bit like the sense of smell. It is hard to describe a smell, but everyone can pretty much agree when something smells bad.

Reg'ing and putting up your first post that in any way references another site (any post within your first day probably) without explicitly being asked about it is 99.992919949999% of the time spam.

That being said, I could see someone posting a recipe and then doing it justice by posting the source on where they got it and not being spam, but then again, if you make that a hard fast rule, people will just abuse it.

I have written thousands of lines of code focusing directly on spam. I help admin a network that has almost 10 million posts and hundreds of thousands of visitors a day. I see spam day in and day out (in case your wondering if any sites on the network are cooking related, sure: Discuss Cooking Forum & Community but that isn't spam ). I also am a reluctant systems administrator who engages in battle with spammers every day. It just comes to a point that you know it when you see it.

The spammers I hate the worst are the ones who reg up one day and post replies something similar to "great idea!" for a few days then unleash their torrent of spam. Or even worse, the ones who start a thread "Does anyone know anything about [INSERT STUPID SPAM TYPE SUBJECT HERE]" and then a few days later, re reg and post a reply with a link.

If someone comes here- posts one time only- with something to sell- and never again returns, takes part, shares recipes, or 'socializes'- even very occasionally... then I consider them just another piece of junk-mail...

On the other hand, those who truly wish to beome a good neighbor - this ain't a difficult place at all to fit-in at. We're a pretty fun & welcoming bunch, if ya ask me!

This is not a spam, just dropping in to say Hi and you are a welcoming bunch and fun to. Cookie